Oliver Hawes, R (on the application of) v London Borough of Tower Hamlets

A local authority’s decision to remove a neighbourhood traffic scheme is reviewed under the ordinary supervisory principles. The court must respect the authority’s evaluative latitude, but must examine whether the outcome falls within the range of reasonable responses and whether the reasoning process contains a demonstrable legal or logical flaw.

Reasons must disclose the decision-maker’s thinking, address the principal controversial issues and permit effective legal accountability. Consultation need not involve repeated rounds whenever officers develop a derivative option during their evaluation. A statutory duty to implement proposals in an approved local implementation plan does not necessarily require their indefinite retention. The plan must contain sufficiently specific proposals and timetable before the duty can be enforced in that way.

The claimant, a local resident, sought judicial review of the decision of the Mayor of Tower Hamlets to remove most of a neighbourhood traffic scheme in Bethnal Green following two rounds of consultation. Transport for London supported the claim on the issue concerning the local implementation plan.

The claim challenged the decision on seven grounds: inadequate reasons, unfair consultation, failure to consider a travel survey, failure to apply Department for Transport guidance, unreasonableness, breach of the implementation and have-regard duties under the Greater London Authority Act 1999, and breach of the best value duty. The central questions were whether the decision-making process was legally defective and whether the approved local implementation plan required the scheme to be retained.

1. The claim was dismissed. The decision was lawful, and permission to appeal was refused. The claimant was subject to the Aarhus costs cap. No costs order was made against Transport for London.
2. Judicial review was supervisory, not substitutionary. The Mayor was entitled to a broad margin of evaluative judgment. The ordinary intensity of review applied. The court nevertheless examined whether the outcome was outside the range of reasonable responses or whether the reasoning process contained a material legal, evidential, logical or methodological flaw.
3. Legally adequate reasons required disclosed thinking, with no genuine doubt about what was decided and why, and required engagement with the principal controversial issues. The Mayor’s reasons sufficiently addressed divisiveness, traffic displacement, car-dependent residents and businesses, emergency access, waste services and network resilience. His decision to retain the Canrobert Street closure was intelligible and supported by the evaluation in the officers’ report.
4. The consultation was not unlawfully unfair. Option 3 was a derivative middle-way developed from consultation responses and available information. Its consideration did not require reconsultation, particularly because it was rejected and the adopted decision was itself derivative of the consultation. The court assumed, without deciding, that removal might deprive consultees of a benefit and that material prejudice was not a separate hurdle.
5. The Greater London Authority Act 1999 did not impose an enforceable continuing duty to retain the scheme. The local implementation plan lacked a sufficiently prescribed timetable and did not identify the scheme with the specificity needed to create that obligation. Implementation could in principle be ongoing, but an open-ended retention duty would need to be expressed in the plan.
6. The best value duty was not engaged by this scheme-specific decision. The report nevertheless provided legally sufficient information about cost and value. There was also no failure to have regard to the local implementation plan, and no breach of the statutory guidance duty: the Department for Transport guidance concerned temporary or experimental schemes and did not establish a general presumption against removal.